Navalny (2022)

Rated R.  It's not a brutal documentary.  I mean, it's a gut-punch and I want everyone to watch it.  But in terms of visuals, there isn't so much that one would consider offensive.  But there is one thing that you should consider: the attempts on Navalny's life are not fiction.  This is real violence happening to a real dude.  Yeah, there's language, but we should be bothered that we're witnessing the real pain of a human being.  R.

DIRECTOR: Daniel Roher

I'm a little ashamed that I don't know more about Alexei Navalny.  As a Ukrainian who just ate up the news around this time, I don't remember much about Alexei Navalny.  Admittedly, I was watching American infrastructure collapse in real time.  Maybe I had marginalized the knowledge of international affairs to make way for other tragic information.

We've entered a weird time in cultural literacy training.  Everything has become a paradox when it comes to absorbing the news.  I'm a CNN guy.  If I look at a bias chart of different news network, it means I skew left and I absorb information that isn't always the most accurate.  I find solace in this because I see where FOX News falls on the scale and that only helps me accept my confirmation bias.  It's true.  We all have a bias.  I looked at the bell curve for accuracy and the dead center, most accepted and accurate news sources were so devoid of morality that they read like robots were transcribing human events.  At the center of Navalny, for all of its breakdown of complex politics, lies the paradox of accepting truth.  There's an irony that the movie starts off with the CNN Films banner.  Me, I accept that immediately.  Of course CNN is fighting the good fight.  While I rant about hypocrisy and bias, I honestly believe that CNN is at the center of a cultural battle to bring truth, but ask a FOX News viewer and this entire blog is considered moot and tainted.  This is always running through my mind throughout this movie. 

It's kind of a bummer because documentaries like Navalny are the best way to understand who Vladimir Putin really is.  Yeah, we get a deep dive into who Alexei Navalny is and I'm really glad to know the man from the ground level.  But Navalny is a foil to Putin.  It's a little bit of what The Diary of Anne Frank does for the Holocaust.  Conceptually, we should all know that Vladimir Putin is a monster and I think, for the most part, we do.  But he's a monster in a movie sense.  He's this removed person who doesn't affect Americans in a blatant way.  Okay, he hacks basically all facets of American culture and turns us against each other.  But we don't see that.  But through the story of Alexei Navalny, the guy who decided to stand up to Putin, we get a greater understanding of the true villainy of Putin.  The apex of this movie is the proof that Vladimir Putin poisoned Alexei Navalny and they got the scientist who did it to accidentally confess.  It's a real Robert Durst moment.  Anyway, let's pretend that we can follow Putin's spin on it, that the whole interview is staged and there is no scientist who did that.  Okay.  But what we do know for sure is that Putin is a nutbar.

I'm looking at the fact that Putin won't say Navalny's name.  Geez Louise, so much is telling about that.  Okay, there's no scenario where I'm not believing Navalny over Putin.  But again, and I'm going to stop saying this, for the Fox News Crew out there, the fact that he refuses to say his name is so telling about his character.  Now, I know that this just makes him seem human to a bunch of folks.  To those people, I actively Justin Timberlake stare in judgment.   But it's the same tactics that Trump did.  (Do you know how much effort it took to avoid dropping his name?  What few far-right punks I had a chance of reaching, I've now completely lost.) I'm probably doing some faulty argumentation here, but it's something as small as not being able to say Navalny's name that really gives the whole game away. 

The culture war in Russia is the antithetical problem we have here.  Here, we have a glut of news that is probably mostly accurate.  Since I'm using CNN as a touchstone, I would like to point out that CNN regularly criticizes Biden, despite being accused of being lib fake-news.  Russia media refuses to criticize Putin any way because it literally is state-run media.  Everything that Putin wants to do, he has the people who are willing to do that for him.  Perhaps it is because of the completely abhorrent economy there, but it is easy to bribe the poor into doing something not on the up-and-up.  I can see that the Q-Anon folks and the alt-right feel like they are in Russia, proclaiming the truth against a wave of people telling otherwise.  But it's also something we have to consider in the cult of personality.  Vladimir Putin and Trump both tip their hands when it comes to criticism.  Listen, Joe Biden, in my mind, is fine.  He's not great.  He's painfully vanilla, to the detriment of the country a lot of the time.  But I don't mind calling him out for that.  He's been called out for worse and has kept his cool.  He keeps things professional and allows people to think poorly of him.

Compare that behavior to that of Trump and Putin.  Yeah, this is a documentary about Alexei Navalny.  But this is Navalny's message: Putin will never let go of power willingly.  He's a child who needs control and is willing to kill to maintain it.  As much as we're focused on Navalny as the subject of this documentary, he's just the microphone that we need to hear about Putin's regime.  There's something that I don't like, but also completely intellectually understand from Navalny's perspective.  Navalny, like Trump, refuses to alienate White supremacists.  It's a real bummer moment in the movie. (Again, CNN doesn't mind showing the whole truth about someone, despite the fact that this documentary paints Navalny in the most loving light imaginable.) I wish that Navalny ripped into White supremacists.  For all I know, he might have sympathies.  I don't know enough about him outside of this doc to make those claims.  But I do know that he is in between a rock and a hard palce with this sham of an election.  Navalny is in this place politically where there's borderline an impossibility to win.  The election isn't real.  It's, at best, to save face and to stress that democracy is a thing in Russia.  

To a certain extent, he has a point.  If Navalny comes out against White supremacists, he's censoring what people have to say.  Now, we can start talking the paradox and misunderstanding of tolerance.  I get the flaw in Navalny's thinking.  But Navalny is in a place of practicality.  Anyone who supports Navalny publicly is at risk of imprisonment.  It's amazing that he has people who show their faces on TV.  I was kind of freaking out for one kid in this documentary who looked right into the camera and realized that his life may be over.  (I'm surprised that CNN didn't think of that.) To turn away supporters means to guarantee loss.  Perhaps his weaponizing of zealots may have a role in changing things (assuming he didn't get arrested for 20 months.  Or now, 11.5 years).  But I also hate to see that happen.  I don't know.  It's these slow deals with the devils that bother me.  But also, I get it.  I really do.

Ultimately, this is the story of a martyr.  I get really depressed thinking about this movie.  I learned a lot about a man in about an hour-and-a-half, but what did I really learn?  Is the world a terrible place?  I know that those living under the oppression of the Soviet Union thought that the Cold War was never going to end.  I know that change seems impossible in the present.  It's only viewed positively through the light of history.  But I can't be the only one who sees the world that we're living in and watching everything rewind to a state where things were worse?  I'll be honest, I get sad a lot.  I'm told that I'm not supposed to share my feelings online, so I'll keep it to a minimal. I was raised believing that human beings are fantastic people.  Alexei Navalny seems like an exceptionally optimistic human being.  He fought a system that was built on oppression and control.  There are people in the streets cheering for him and fighting for him.  But Alexei Navalny's imprisonment and martyrdom was supposed to be the door for change.  Has anything changed?  Putin is going to be president for ending.  There will be no comeuppance.  It's going to be this.  Forever. 

​Bullies win.